Dreams, drawings and psychoanalytic fun

Menu

Tag Archives: recurrent dreams

For my day-job, I rent workspace, and one place I worked has recently closed down. Not particularly a problem, because I was hardly ever there anyway, and there are other places I can work from, but I did like the manager there. He was a gentle, unassuming middle-class hippie who I imagine trying to balance yurt-living with academia.

Last night I dreamt he was repurposing the space to hold soirees where people came to play music, exhibit art, smoke the pipe and almost certainly have orgies. I was just a little offended that he didn’t think my business would fit in with that.

But then dead bodies – naked ones, I think – started turning up in the city. They were dumped just beyond the edges of my parents’ cul-de-sac (which as you may know, is in an entirely different part of the country from where I live), and I think my mum and I discovered them together.

Whatever point my subconscious mind was trying to make recently with this dream, it obviously feels I haven’t got it yet. (Fair enough, I haven’t. There was so much going on in the moonlight dream that I could be mulling it over for months.)

What recurring themes have you noticed in your dreams? Do you have dreams that recur every so often, over many years (like the one where your exams are tomorrow, and your revision notes have turned into a shoe)? Or, as I’m having currently, a cluster of similar-feeling dreams happening over a few weeks or months? Let me know in the comments!

Oh, and please do subscribe to this site so that I can update you on the next unlikely killing spree.

It’s just over three months since I started keeping this blog; high time I made some visual aids to show some of the themes I’ve been noticing in my dreams.

A word cloud, created using the full text from all my blog posts. The Word It Out software removes ‘stop words’ such as it, the, and, or, but. And, I’ve removed the words dream(s), and subconscious because I don’t think their inclusion would illustrate anything outside of the obvious!

This second word cloud consists of all of the feelings and emotions that I’ve identified in my dreams over the last three months. These include the emotions that my dream-self has felt, and also any that have been directed at me by other people in dreams. (Some of the emotions I’ve included here were not named directly in the original blog posts that they’re taken from. I re-read each post and as I did so, thought about what emotional reactions I was indirectly – if not directly – describing.)

You’ll notice that most of these emotions or feelings are negative ones. I wanted to create a graph showing the ratio of ‘good’ to ‘bad’ dreams that I’ve had, but since many of my dreams contained mixed or ambigious feelings, it was hard to categorise them as either/or.

So, using the same word list as the cloud above, and the frequency with which each feeling occurred, the ratio of my ‘positive’ to ‘negative’ dream-emotions looks like this:

That’s more than 82% negative, which does not entirely tally with Freud’s idea that all dreams are a kind of wish-fulfilment.

How about you, folks? I’d love to hear what your most common dream-emotions are, so do comment and let me know!

I’ll make new, stylish graphs and clouds every three months (or monthly if I have enough data for it to be interesting). And, of course you can let me know if you think there are any other themes or patterns that you think I should be representing in chart-form…